Westfold Tier 7 for Farmers

With RoI now live, I was keen to have a look at the changes to the farming profession, something I didn’t sneak a peek at in Beta. Tiers 1 to 6 seem to be unchanged, but Tier 7, the Westfold Tier has a number of changes, which personally I think are pretty good.

Fairwen trying out the Leek Field Recipe

You start with the recipes for Black Barley, which seems to be a must have for all the Tier 7 Cooks recipes, Leeks and Bilberries. The first major change you notice is that these fields are multi-output. You can make either the ordinary field, which uses ordinary crop seeds, and has a low to medium crop yield, and low chance of crit materials, or you can make a hearty field, which uses hearty crop seeds, and has a high crop yield and greater chance to acquire crit materials. This greater yield comes at a price, the Westfold crop seeds are 2.4 silver, and the Hearty ones are 12 silver. In terms of xp, the fields for both give 8 xp, yet the more crops you have the more xp will be gained in the process of turning them into useable items. Also, unlike the previous tiers, you no longer need a form of fertiliser, just the crop seed (or Hearty crop seed) and a barrel of water, bought from the vendors.

The benefits of using a Hearty Recipe

This is where te second noticeable change is. In Tier 7, there is the opportunity to process in bulk. All crops in Tier 7 work on a 1:1 basis, whereas in previous tiers it was 1:4. In the crafting panel there is two options for processing – you can process the crops one at a time (as with previous tiers) for 6xp each, or you can use the bulk option, and process them five at a time. Using the bulk option gives 8xp for five, so is no good if you need the xp, but once mastered it is a big time saver.

You have the option to Bulk process crops

In the process of farming there is a chance to get Pinches of Westfold Herbs, a crit item used by Cooks, and a Pile of Rich Soil. Rich Soil is a random crit item from faring, but it can also drop off humanoid mobs or be found in loot chests or off corpses, much the way whetstones are found. This item can either be used as part of the Compost recipe, which converts it into Peat, a crit item for farming, or it is an essential item in two other recipes. These are the Wild Flower recipe, which has a chance to drop the necessary dye components used by Scholars, for every dye (yep, Amaranth Petals, Iris Roots, Indigo, etc) or a Wild Pipe Weed recipe, which we can assume will do something similar, and get various different types of pipe weed. These two recipes are however only available from the Dunlending Reputation Vendors, and not from Expert Farmers. Unfortunately, none of my alts with farming as part of their crafts (erm I think that’s 5 of them!) will be venturing into the new expansion any time soon, so it will be a while before I get to test those recipes for myself.

Thank you for the breakdown Emma. I have yet to farm any since the release and this gives me a good idea of what to expect. I have to say I am disappointed by the 1:1 ratio and I hope it’s a bug or we get an explanation why it was done this way.

To be honest I quite like the 1:1 ratio for the Tier 7, but maybe thats because I have alot of farmers. I always seem to have about 600 strawberries, so this should help with my bag space. They have reduced the number of ingredients needed for crafting across the board, so perhaps they were trying to reflect this with the farming.
Emma

I bought 100 hearty (good) seeds (1.2Gold) and made 600 crops of barley, which translated to 600 bundles of barley.

1.2 gold in seeds??? yes!!
1 hour to plant/harvest 100 seeds??? yes!!
1 hour to process crops to product??? yes!!
VERY EXPENSIVE, both money and time wise.
After that, 600 bundles of barley turned into 300 cups of flour
the most expensive 300 cups of flour I’ve ever made, EVER!!

Explain me the guild ingredient recipes for the cook?
3x Cups of Oatmeal recipe (3 day cooldown)
What you need:
2 Bundles of Black Barley
1 Small Westfold Repast
and for the small repast what do you need?
1 Cup of Oatmeal (wait what??? oatmeal to make oatmeal?)
—– this is
—– 2 Bundles of Black Barley
—– 1 Pinch of Westfold Herbs
1 Cup of Black Barley Flour (add 2 more bundles of black barley here!!)
1 Piece of Goat Cheese
1 Large Bottle of Milk
1 Chicken Egg

So, to make 3x cups of oatmeal (every 3 days) you need:
4 bundles of black barley and a bunch of other stuff. So you saved 2 bundles of black barley and 2 pinches of westfold herbs but had to buy cheese, milk and an egg and have to wait 3 days to use the recipe again? nah! if you ask me I’d rather use my regular recipe with no cooldown, I don’t see the logic here, unless it’s 5x instead of 3x it’s a no-no.